Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.

• In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)
• Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture)
• Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
• Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
• Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
• Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle
• The Intimacies of Four Continents
• The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978--1979 (Lectures at the College de France)